Huffpo reports that Harris internals *NEVER* had her ahead.
This deserves its own post but I don’t have my real keyboard or anything approaching a real desk (or a real three or four hours to devote to writing it) so I’ll just put down some quick thoughts:
Huffpost is reporting that Harris internals *NEVER* had her ahead.
This makes the whole “not going on Rogan” downright stupid. If you are behind, then you need to pull a Crazy Ivan. Going on Rogan was the best thing she could have done.
UNLESS
Harris is a lightweight empty suit who would have been exposed as being paper-thin by a three hour interview.
Not going on Rogan, in that case, wasn’t a bad move. It was the smart move. She’d have lost by even more had she gone on Rogan… if that was true, of course.
The rumors that Pelosi wanted an open primary become a little more credible. The downsides of having an open primary become a little less risky when weighed against what the insiders knew the actual risks actually were.
WHAT THE HELL WAS UP WITH THAT IOWA POLL
One-point-five billion from the donors? Hrm. Maybe *THAT* was what was up with the Iowa poll. One last little injection of hope before the rug-pull. (I’d check that lady’s financials. She torched her reputation with that last one. I wouldn’t mind setting my reputation on fire for 2.3 million bucks. I could retire with enough to take the occasional trip. How is Selzer doing?)
Was this a Harris problem or is it a Democrats problem?
Or is it not a problem at all and concern trolls should shut up and start working on 2026, the most important election of our lifetimes?
That piece in HuffPo reads to me like political professionals protecting their careers. “We never had a chance. There was nothing we could do.” This might be true, or it might not.
I mean, my first reaction was, “campaigns don’t matter”. “Alway behind” is the message in all their fundraisers, and I assure you, I saw a lot of them. But it was framed as polls in swing states. She had a 3 point lead in national polls, which collapsed in the last 10 days. I still don’t understand that collapse.
At a guess, she probably insisted on not being edited on Joe Rogan’s show. And Rogan’s people wouldn’t agree to that.
I am skeptical it would make that much difference. She went on Fox News. That didn’t move the needle at all. Not at all. Some called her an empty suit, but those folks were voting Republican anyway.
I don’t think she’s an empty suit. I think she’s a lawyer. She talks like a lawyer, and people hate lawyers. She never learned the trick that Bill Clinton (a lawyer) did, of not sounding like a lawyer.Report
I know that the professionals who didn’t get a retirement payday have to cover their behinds and get hired next time by the next sucker (Buttigieg?).
But I do know that internal polling did exist and the internal polls had numbers.
Is it true that the internals never had her ahead?
Who would know that would say on the record?
If there isn’t anyone, we’re stuck with wondering if anyone will come forward anonymously and say “we were neck and neck in the internals too! But Selzer’s poll was accurate until it wasn’t!” or something like that.Report
I have an explanation for Selzer’s poll. It’s called the Bradley Effect.
The big difference in a demographic breakdown between 2024 on one hand, and 2020 and 2016 on the other is white women. They turned out about 10 million less for Harris than they did for Hillary or Biden. But they apparently didn’t feel like they could tell pollsters this.
Or maybe they went to the polls and just didn’t pull the lever, because they *did* vote to defeat certain anti-abortion measures, even in very red states.
I don’t *know* that this is the case. It’s impossible to *know* that. However, the demographic breakdown and comparison with prior presidential elections is a factual thing that can be known.
However, I think it is highly unlikely that going on Joe Rogan would have addressed whatever questions these white women had in any meaningful way.Report
Men + College turned out for Harris 2% more than in 2020.
It’s the Men – College and Women (both kinds!) that turned out more for Trump.
And the demographic breakdowns! Seriously, I think we should think about removing the black and brown and yellow stripe from the rainbow flag if they keep this up.Report
Do you have a solid reference for exit poll results with demographic breakdowns. I’d like us to be on the same page when it comes to data.Report
I got it from Nate Silver.
WAIT! That’s just men. Lemme find some women breakdowns…
Patrick Ruffini has what you need.
White 45+
White College Men
White Urban
Post Graduate Study
All swung toward Harris.
Married Men and 65+ held steady.
Every other group swung to Trump.
Which, yes, includes Women.Report
I take it that this means that their internal polling always had them within the margin of error and perhaps a point or two ahead and/or a point or two behind depending on the time and state.
I’m going to continue with my view that seems to make the professional and armchair pundits of the world deeply unhappy. It was inflation, stupid. Inflation kicked in world wide in 2021 and has felled the governments that were in charge in 2021 left and right. There are dozens of examples of throw the bums out election results since 2021. Liberal parties have been defeated and conservative parties have been defeated.
I will also propose that it is possible Harris did everything correctly or as correctly as possible and the result was a relatively narrow loss for the Democrats all things considered. Trump only received a plurality vote. I think the current percentage is 49.9 or 49.8 compared to Harris’ 48.6. The Democrats managed to flip a three seats in New York and two seats in California. The GOP managed to flip some seats as well and this resulted in stasis basically, a narrow GOP majority in the House. The GOP flipped four Senate seats but only one of them was in a state one would consider purple/blue and that was Pennsylvania. No one ever seriously thought Harris was a contender in Montana, Ohio, or West Virginia and it is highly plausible that she could have won but Tester, Brown, and Manchin would be replaced by Republicans.
But all of this is not very fun and doesn’t let people show how was and good their opinions views and advice are so it will be ignored. Let us stroke our chins pompously and wonder why the New York Times does not offer us an op-ed column.Report
“It’s the inflation, stupid” plus post-COVID malaise doesn’t allow the right wag their fingers at the Democrats, leftists to wag the fingers at the Democrats, and liberals to do jeremiads about the racism and misogyny of the United States. Nobody gets to have any fun or make any more from pontificating.
The group I still don’t understand are the people who believe a strong further left message would help the Democrats despite the sheer rejection of police reform in the most Democratic areas of the United States.Report
I have a problem with looking at a weak, inexperienced candidate making unforced errors and then concluding none of that mattered as we also insist it was a close election.Report
Everybody is big disagreement about what those unforced errors were. The only one that seems like a real big mistake was not appearing on Rogan.Report
RE: unforced errors.
Is she running on “four more years” or is it “change”? She claimed the later but can’t say what she’d change.
Same issue with is she running on “supreme advisor of Biden” or “out of the room when that was decided against her will”? Either way she should be able to claim some successes from Biden or point to failures and say it wasn’t her fault.
With her being accused of being an empty suit, using word salad to avoid answering questions looks really bad. Note “unforced error” is the best possible spin, the worst is she really is an empty suit who doesn’t know basic things.
She’s refusing to define herself but she did the opposite in 2020 when she was running as far Left. The strong implication is she’s still far left and knows her views are amazingly unpopular. If that’s not correct then it’s an unforced error and if it is correct then she had no businesses trying to be the lead candidate.
When she has clearly changed from 2020 (example: fracking) she should be very open about why. Presumably open doesn’t mean “there is a swing state that uses this as a core to their economy” but rather “the war with Russia has changed her mind on the effects of being dependent on Russian gas”.
What she did instead was this song and dance where she tried to pretend she hadn’t changed her mind which got her the worst of both worlds. This assumes she actually had changed her mind and wasn’t planning on banning fracking her first day in office.
“Unforced errors” is the best possible spin on all this. “Empty suit” is worse. Still worse would be “unelectable if even slightly truthful and knows it”.Report
Sure it does. What causes inflation? Excessive stimulus. Who fired a huge blast of excessive stimulus right before inflation took off? The Democrats.Report
All sorts of things can cause inflation. like:
And coming out of a once a century pandemic, we had nearly all of those. Laying it ONLY at the feet of democrats is, at best, wishcasting.Report
There’s something to the inflation theory.
There’s also something against it. Namely, that it was done with over a year ago. That it didn’t appear to have a big effect in 2022. That as soon as the election was over, people have started saying, “Oh, it isn’t a problem”. Because it isn’t now a problem. Gasoline is at the lowest price it has been at in maybe 20 years for me.
Report
The Tories in the UK got thrased because of inflation in July of 2024. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party got thrashed in an election in October 2024. Canada’s liberals are on the road to getting thrashed in elections next year. New Zealand’s general election was in 2023 and they kicked out the Labour Party there. Germany’s ruling coalition has been getting canned in its state elections and will likely get canned in the next Federal election.
People had long memories of the inflation. This is why politicians fear inflation. There are always some local issues involved but inflation is the big one. But again, it is unsatisfying to human urges so we discount it.Report
The inflation theory is pretty solid considering that incumbent administrations, left, right, center and purple have been turfed out by their electorates globally in the last couple years. The only common theme connecting these turfings has been recent inflation.Report
And this is why I said there’s something to it in my first sentence.
I’d like to see my questions about this thesis addressed, though.Report
Sure! Your questions are :”inflation was tamed”, various opinion makers said “it’s not a problem anymore” and prices for some specific goods (Gas) are back to pre-inflation levels.
The answers I’d offer are:
-Inflation being tamed or tamped back down to normal levels doesn’t make the prices, in general, go back to the levels the masses remember, it just means the prices stop rising. But the masses remember those old prices and that rankles them. Yes, absolutely, their wages are also higher but humans, being humans, tend to think of wage gains as being earned by them while price increases are blamed on others.
-Yes, various opinion makers and economists said inflation was dealt with and, as a literal matter, it was because it reverted to historical trends. In economic terms that resolved the problem but as a political problem the masses would only have viewed it as being fixed if prices had gone back to a lower level which would have required an economic calamity or some kind of incredible explosion of productivity, the former which would be highly undesirable and the latter which is magic pixie dust.
-And, yeah, a few things went back down in price. Gas chief among them. But apparently Trump and the rights messaging on that was able to drown that fact out. There’s a really asymmetrical difference between the left and right about the way their respective partisans view the economy. Both sides view the economy more negatively when the opposing side is in the White House but the effect is about three times more severe on the right than the left.Report
North’s explanation is all correct but bottom line is that prices are on average up almost 25% from where they were in 2019, including on a lot of essentials. It may just be the stage of life I am in with a couple younger kids but it has been a very serious pinch. It is blindingly obvious that cost of living got a lot more expensive every time we look at what we’re spending on groceries and other basics every month. And we’re the lucky ones who have been able to manage it without any big changes. We can easily make do without some of the extras.
Having more than a couple brain cells to rub together I understand that Donald Trump, especially the Donald Trump promising huge tariffs and big tax cuts isn’t going to do anything about this. But even with full employment and a hot economy this has hurt, and if it’s hurt me it’s very easy to imagine it really hurting those less well off. It isn’t made up, not in the slightest.Report
That would make sense if low-information voters weren’t low-information voters, who, by definition, don’t know what’s true and largely don’t care.Report
Here’s James Carville ‘s take. I found it hilarious and frankly, on point–assuming it’s real. Still funny if it’s not, cause it’s basically true.
https://x.com/Rusty_Weiss/status/1861364050816348604?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1861364050816348604%7Ctwgr%5Eb3134f023965102ba512e235e0bac3e1703d613c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fneveryetmelted.com%2FReport
He’s been saying that sort of thing for years. Probably right about it too.Report
He’s right. What operation trusts big decisions like that to someone fresh out of college?Report
I agree with you, which is why I doubt that’s what happened.Report
Duh, good point.Report
Well, that post/statement assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. Carville is a politician. They love to do stuff like that.
I mean, do we have evidence that it was a 23-year-old staffer who blocked the Joe Rogan interview?
Also, see above where I question whether a Joe Rogan interview would have helped Harris at all, particularly with white women, which where she saw her biggest deficits in comparison to Biden in 2020.Report
Evidence? Well, the Financial Times had a story about it. We talked about it here.
Note: Palmieri started walking it back the second she realized what she had said.
For what that’s worth.
But she did say what she said before she walked it back.Report
I really don’t think “inflation” explains the details of this data: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/
The environmental effect of “there was inflation and it was bad” was in effect for the whole period of the chart above.
Meanwhile I see two salient things: Underestimation of Trump (again!) and some erosion of support for Harris in the last couple weeks of the campaign, coupled with a modest gain in support for Trump. In spite of the self own of the Madison Square Garden thing.
These movements cannot be accounted for by sampling error – or sampling noise as you might call it. We can see the sampling noise all along, it’s those little bumps.
The movements aren’t big, but I think there’s enough data here to conclude that they are real. What accounts for them?
Would going on Joe Rogan have fixed this? How could we know?Report
We have to keep in mind that it looks like Trump won by a percentage point and change in the popular vote. That falls entirely within the margin of error in these polling aggregations and polls you’re looking at here. Basically either Trump or Kamala winning by those margins is entirely compatible with the polling data we see in these charts.Report
Going on Joe Rogan would not have fixed it if Harris is an empty vessel who mouths whatever platitudes she thinks will gain her temporary advantage in any given moment.
If she were an actual person with an internal life, then going on Joe Rogan would have helped her somewhat.Report
There were apparently a lot of people who didn’t even know that Biden dropped out until Election Day:
https://www.10news.com/news/fact-or-fiction/fact-or-fiction-did-biden-drop-out-search-spiked-tuesdayReport
An interesting exercise from Eugene Volokh: a 1% popular vote swing would have produced a Harris win along the “Blue Wall” path, and a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, and the Senate would be 52-48 rather than its projected 53-47. Make it a 1.1% swing and Harris would have kept Georgia in the Democrats’ column. Bear in mind, all that Professor Volokh is doing here is playing with numbers.
There’s a couple of really basic things to say about that observation. First, of course, is that yeah that suggests this was actually a pretty close election and very much not a landslide for Trump. Second is that those political consultants who may well be trying to salvage their reputations after losing what seemed like a very winnable election maybe ought to be including this fact as part of their pitch — but then again, their raison d’etre is to make that 1% flip actually happen, and it didn’t. Third is that Trump makes everything different, which I take as a matter of faith to be true even though there’s no way of proving or disproving it.
Seems to me that Harris & Co. did damn near everything right from the moment she got the football, but this was the result anyway. Had she chosen Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz? I don’t see that making a difference. Had she found “X” issue to more forcefully distinguish herself from Biden? Probably not. Had she gone on Joe Rogan? I’m inclined to think she’d have got about the same result.
And the reason is the factoid that that Lee just cited. And another one I saw this morning — “casual” voters, by definition the low-information, low-engagement folks — broke for Trump by enough to carry him over the top. If you didn’t know that Biden had dropped out and Harris was the candidate on Election Day that feels to all of us like indifference to politics elevated to the level of a ludicrous superpower. But those people seem to actually vote, and in a very closely-divided electoral scenario, yeah, that could be decisive, or perhaps more accurately, that could be a substantial part of what was decisive.Report
If the voters who had no idea that Biden dropped out all voted Trump, the only option was “keeping them at home” rather than “getting them to show up for Harris”.
What is the plan for keeping them at home?
I submit: Harris should have given Rockstar Studios that 1 Billion dollars and gotten Grand Theft Auto VI to come out in October of 2024.Report
I can’t imagine having my head up my rear enough to not know that the Democratic Party replaced their front runner.Report
My dude, we’re both lawyers who deal with individuals. We’ve both heard people tell stories that reflect the remarkable degree of physical flexibility necessary to put one’s own head THERE.Report
True that. It still seems like a very sad way to live one’s life.Report
Sad? Living life in such a way that the government has so little effect upon your life that you don’t even know who the president is?
That sounds like *BLISS*.Report
It does now.Report
Fixed it for ya.Report
For the most part, it seemed to me that both campaigns were acting like Harris was going to win on November 5th or thought that such a thing was more likely than not. There was a fair bit of media that stated Harris was winning late-deciders were going for her and anecdotal evidence in the media that made it seem so. But it turns out they broke for Trump and a lot of it might have been relentless anti-trans propaganda and/or a bit of the leopards won’t eat my face thinking.
Now I have no idea where the idea that late voters were breaking for Harris was coming from. I just saw it reported in the media and on the internet from various sources that should have been reputable. Maybe late breaking early voters broke for Harris but late breaking election day voters did not and that put Trump over the line
So I can see this being depressingly true.Report
It is depressing how little cognitive ability is necessary to go through life. I suppose the idea that late voters were going to break for Harris came from a hope for common sense to triumph.Report
It’s true that Trump only won by approx 1.5%, but the interesting thing to me is that Biden won by 4.5% so the *swing* is really significant … plus winning the popular vote upended a growing narrative that the Dems were ‘assured’ 2%-3% popular vote win and needed at least that just to offset the EC ‘bias’.
That’s a genuinely big swing that wasn’t anticipated.Report
A lot of people? How many people?
Unfortunately Google Trends doesn’t reveal the actual search statistics. This is what they are measuring:
“Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.”
On Google Trends you are able to see the breakdown per region (state) – and apparently between Nov 3-9 this search term was only made in 17 states.
Now if you expand the “Interest Over Time” chart to the “past 12 months” instead of the “past 30 days”, you see that the Election Day search spike was more of a blip when compared to July 21-27.
Basically, this is a silly story about nothing.Report
Do you disagree with the point that we’re probably talking about a lot of low-engagement, low-information voters, though? Maybe not voters so willfully ignorant they had to ask, en masse, if Biden had even dropped out by election day, but still pretty low-information?Report
Honestly, I find the whole “low-information” voter conversation tone-deaf and obnoxious. It always happens when Democrats lose an election. In fact, it only happens when Democrats lose. When they win, those swing voters are all upstanding, enlightened citizen heroes.
It’s quite surreal to watch the party that so worries about the fragility of democracy so quickly blame the electorate for not voting they way they want because of their general stupidity.
I find it hard to believe that people so disengaged and clueless would suffer the inconvenience of voting. And if you think so many deeply ignorant people are actually voting, perhaps let’s pump the brakes on the Get Out The Vote advocacy. I mean, the public is berated (shamed even) to go vote – and then when they do and the wrong candidate wins – you blame these morons who were just doing what they were told.
You can’t have it both ways. It’s a Democracy. If you want to win, run a better candidate. Blaming the public for your failure is not the path to self-improvement.Report
Voters in Mississippi – real people I interact with daily – still complain about gas prices being too high, even though locally they were down under $2.50 a gallon by the election – which is roughly where they were when Biden took office. Meaning where they were when Trump left office in the middle of a pandemic. They all long for the COVID low price which reflected low demand – and had zero to do with any Trump policy or action.
So yes, lower information voters are indeed a thing. And they turned out to vote heavily this year at nearly previous year levels (62% of eligible voters). They also supported a candidate who isn’t going to make life any cheaper for them.
Call me nuts but that’s a clear indication of low information.Report
“even though locally they were down under $2.50 a gallon by the election – which is roughly where they were when Biden took office.”
While I generally don’t pay much attention to everything that comes out of candidate’s mouth, or their team, did Kamala’s team even MENTION this fact? Where did she say that in an interview, etc.? I’d think that’d be a very important talking point.Report
If they won’t believe their own eyes. why would they believe it from someone they would be predisposed to disbelieve?Report
https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-poised-get-major-boost-falling-gas-prices-1947360Report
“low-information voter” is how a liberal says “black people” without, they think, being racist.Report
To be fair to liberals, they also mean poor and working class white people.
And I’d add that, to some extent, they’re right. A politics of the upper middle and upper classes, by the upper middle and upper middle classes, for the upper middle and upper classes, results in a lot of just ignoring political discourse outside of those groups, and understandably.
What politically-engaged white, educated, relatively well off liberals really mean is people who don’t have the same interests as they do.Report
To add to this, one of the tells is the seemingly universal belief among liberals that the main reason Harris loss is due to misinformation, with “low information voters” being misinformed and manipulated.
To the extent that this is true (e.g., the stoking of immigration fears or the great trans scare), it’s true of pretty much everyone, but in a broader sense, people are pretty aware of their bank accounts, their grocery bills, their rent, gas prices, etc., and liberals’ insistence than the economy is great, actually, because inflation is down (as though that means the massive rise in prices over the last 2 years disappears) or the stock market’s kicking ass, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being manipulated, is pretty insulting.Report
Google Trends link:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=did%20joe%20biden%20drop%20out&hl=enReport
What search engine are they using in SD I wonder?Report
I found this comment on Reddit to be very illuminating: https://www.reddit.com/r/Askpolitics/comments/1h14fyg/comment/lz90pnj/
It was written by an early millennial (born in the early ’80s) who saw Harris as part of the same old, same old. It came down to wanting to see the neocons out of the presidency.Report
Man, that comment, that thread, that entire comment section.
Part of me thinks that we should have had an OT subreddit a million years ago… now? Hoo, boy. I’m glad we don’t.Report
I wonder if Vernon Reid is considering updating the Cult of Personality lyrics for the new century. Obama and Trump certainly fill the bill.Report
They remastered it for CM Punk’s return to the WWE so I doubt it.
But I’m sure that they could make a corker.
Back in 2020, I saw Joe Biden as a return to normalcy after “The Mule” came in and shook things up.
Now I’m seeing that 2nd Foundation was full of crap.Report
Trump is for sure an agent of change. Almost certainly for ill, but hope springs eternal.Report
He’s a rebuke.
A rebuke that got a “HOW DARE YOU” in 2016.
Maybe it’ll be listened to by 2028.
Maybe we’ll get Clinton/Harris 2028 instead. “STILL WITH HER!”Report
I think one thing is that he’s got the idea that the Democrats’ ideas here are somehow Nancy Pelosi’s fault, and that’s not true; they’ve always been a machine-politics party, their idea being that the public should align itself into a bunch of blocs and then those blocs wrestle over who gets the most benefits, with the Government (run by Democrats) acting as referee for the scrum and bookkeeper for the payouts.
Which works pretty well with Burt Likko’s “Three Classes” idea; that there’s a Welfare class, which believes that the proper source for income is The Government, and that if someone has more money then the government saw fit to give them more (or, through tax breaks, permit them to keep more of what they have.)
Meaning that the 2016 and 2024 elections were in fact expressions of class war, just in the American version of it which a lot of writers don’t understand because they’re used to thinking of “class” in terms of hereditary nobility titles to land in Europe.Report
I agree completely with this statement.Report
The bit about “Harris is an empty suit” is somewhat supported by the fact that between December 2019 and July 2024 she made very few public appearances of any kind, certainly not the sort of training-and-experience work you’d expect from someone who was being put forward as The Future Of The Democratic Party.Report
She made the appearances and speeches a VP normally makes in the first term of what was expected to be a two term Presidency. Which got the media coverage that a VP normally receives during the first term of what was expected to be a two term presidency.
By the time that changed, she had months to do years worth of work.Report
If you want a little more grist for the “it wasn’t supposed to be Harris” mill, there’s this.
Lindy Li works as a chair at the DNC and she had an interview that you can watch at the link or, heck, just read this:
She might just be throwing Harris to the wolves to save her own skin, of course.Report
They’re throwing Biden under the bus. Again.Report
That ain’t just Biden under there, though.
But we have another thing to look at for the post-mortem. “Harris was Biden’s poison pill. She was the Quayle to Biden’s Bush and when they pulled the whole trick where they had the social media team resign on Biden’s behalf, he gave them Harris and gave her to them *HARD*.”
It wasn’t so long ago that this was a conspiracy theory.Report
Biden and Harris, the outgoing President who failed to secure his chosen replacements spot and the failed candidate who didn’t get the nod from the voters. Being thrown under the bus is, sadly, kind of their role at this stage.Report
This whole “we can’t lose a single skirmish, a single battle, EVER!” thing is not only giving pyrrhic victories, it’s giving the occasional pyrrhic loss.Report
Never put down to malice what can be explained with incompetence.
Biden was forced to step down. It probably never occurred to him that Team Blue wanted someone other than Harris to step in and he was just being a team player.
Either it was less than clear to him that she wasn’t ready or he didn’t care or he didn’t see any alternatives. To be fair, time pressures made the alternatives ugly.
After having a crazy quick nomination contest, with no notice, they’d need to then unify Team Blue behind someone.Report
Most notably, many of the states had already concluded their primaries by then and would have had to spin up to run others – which would have required time and money the states likely didn’t have and the Democrats wouldn’t spend.Report
I don’t think the plan was to re-do the primaries state by state, but to have a sort of speed-dating debate/rebuttal followed by the convention delegates exercising their pre-existing duties subject to the by-laws of the Democratic party.
Not exactly a smoke filled room, more like an airy convention scented room with bad coffee, spotty wifi, and snacks.Report
“The plan” hadn’t been created yet and was still subject to negotiations and pressure by various interested parties.
There is no one, other than Biden, who has the ability to select one specific candidate and/or rules and the party needs to be unified.
We’re also going to have the problem of “what is wrong with Harris” and not taking her isn’t going to sit well. Her supporters will claim it’s because she’s a black female. Figuring out that she’s really bad at this will take longer than they have.Report
If there ever was a “plan,” no one has described what it was, how it would have worked, who wanted it, and how it could be sold as any better than: “Hey, this is why we have Vice Presidents.”Report
There’s the brief outline given by the person who is a chair at the DNC…Report
Which says what?Report
Here, let me copy and paste it for you:
Lindy Li: “I know they didn’t. It’s not a matter conjecture for me. I know they didn’t. She said it was fine that I went on air to encourage President Biden to step down and that it was July 21st when I went on Fox News Sunday and I said it was it was time for him to step down and pass the mantle to the next generation.
Obama and Pelosi were both hoping for a primary instead of a coronation, so to speak. Who do you think they were hoping for? I don’t think Pelosi was hoping for anyone in particular or not that I know of.
The chieftains of the party were hoping for a lightning round, a lightning primary. And President Biden essentially preempted that by issuing his endorsement 30 minutes after he dropped out.
I don’t think anyone saw that coming. We did not see that coming. I think a lot of people anticipated that he might have stepped aside, but no one anticipated a twofer that we got that day.”Report
So somebody had some idea of doing something that nobody had worked out or figured out how to sell. Good to know.
They have the perfectly good excuse that there wasn’t time after Biden endorsed Harris. But there probably wasn’t time for concocting something else anyway. Though maybe somebody could have articulated by now what the plan would have been.Report
Looked back at what Mark Halperin said in July:
Here’s my guess at what happened. The “I’m Sick” tweet was a testing of the waters to see if Biden, stuck at home with a case of the ‘vid, still had access to his social media and/or was nimble enough to block a “fake” resignation before the damage was done.
Biden’s media team “resigned” on Biden’s behalf and without Biden’s knowledge and the plan was something like the above.
Biden (and his team) finding out about the “resignation” knew that they couldn’t do anything about resigning *BUT* they did know that they could ruin the plans of those behind the resignation by endorsing Harris and closing off the whole fight on the floor of the convention to find the best replacement.
Biden (and/or his team) did this knowing that Harris sucks (and he knew that Harris sucked because she was his g-darn VP for the previous three years).
There’s a lot that you can criticize about Biden but, when he’s sharp, he’s *VERY* sharp and he had an inkling about what would happen if Harris ran.
And it did.
But if you want what a plan looked like, I’d look at what Halperin said as he was the guy that, I presume, the party went to in order to explain the plan before they put it into effect.Report
Concepts of a plan.
As for the open convention with Harris and three others, who would pick the other three, who would they be, why would people accept the selections as legitimate, and why wouldn’t the sitting Vice President be the prohibitive favorite in an abbreviated four-way race?Report
Sure, but my guess is that the people who orchestrated Biden’s dropping out shared their plan with Halperin and then Biden threw a wrench into it.
I base that on Halperin getting the first half of the plan 100% and then everything going sideways when Biden tweeted out his support for Harris.Report
The key point is this is why we have VPs.
We don’t have time for a full state-by-state. We don’t use the smoke filled room anymore.
I think they didn’t think it through. These are people who knew Harris. Ergo they knew she wasn’t a great choice.Report
Sure, whatever notional ‘plans’ were being concocted were obviously pre-empted by Biden’s immediate and unexpected endorsement.
But from a simple logistics point of view, it is highly unlikely a state-by-state re-do was going to happen. Maybe a cool ‘dancing with the stars’ online straw poll or something — purely to inform the ‘judges’ at the convention. Or some such.Report
One thing that I realize now that it comes out that Harris spent somewhere between $1 Billion and $2 Billion in her campaign:
That $80 million in Biden’s coffers didn’t mean *THAT* much.Report
Hindsight is 20/20.Report
That’s like only 80 ‘Call her Daddy’ offsite interviews.Report
I suspect Biden knew all this, and I suspect he threw his weight behind VP Harris because she was the VP and as the inveterate institutionalist he is, Biden wanted to make the point that the VP is supposed to take over.
The optics of it weren’t on his mind.Report
It’s equally possible he thought that an intra party fight would hurt them or that he knew the people forcing him out didn’t want Harris so he endorsed her to spit them. There’s no true telling. Likewise we have no idea of an intra party fight would have produced a better candidate or a better outcome. I would like to note, at this date, that it looks like the Dems actually gained seats in Congress, net, of 2024. Not to be too Pollyanna but there are a lot of alternate universes with worse outcomes for the Dems than this one that Harris delivered to us.Report
Here’s where we were arguing about it in real time over the weekend it occurred. Cray cray.Report
I am not at all displeased with my commentary in that thread. Thank you Jay.Report
Some interesting remarks in that thread about a potential pardon for Hunter Biden. Just sayin’.Report
The whole thing is great. I love going back and rereading our archives.Report